Monday 7 February 2011

Oh Dear! It's Official! I'm a Parodic Curmudgeon

I think one of the reasons satire works so well at getting a point across is that the humour makes it palatable and easy to swallow, or, as the old adage has it, many a true word spoken in jest. In today's Ed Reardon's week on Radio 4, the eponymous curmudgeon takes the post of writer-in-residence at the uni[versity] where his son-in-law is a professor of music specialising in Glam Rock, The Osmonds, The New Romantics, and Take That. His daughter is also on the teaching staff and gives seminars on things like dream catchers. To prepare him for the interview, she tells him not to correct the interview board's grammar, since none of them would ever have heard of a split infinitive.
This sets the scene for Ed's impassioned [near] monologue on the state of the uni[versity] system in response to his professor's interruption of his lecture and her instructions to his students to write fictious begging letters for funds from prospective benefactors for the uni[versity],
  "Stop writing class. You're not doing any of that. Fiction is one thing; craven mendacity is quite another. In another module, probably. No doubt in the Dominoes Pizza Symposium Suite.
  "Ed, are you withholding cooperation?"
  "Yes."
  "Well, in future, don't."
  "Oh, well, in future you might want to reflect on the total moral bankruptcy of the education system. All it does is subscribe to this shallow narcissism and moronic self-interest of this solipsistic age with its idiotic buzz words like back in the day and up close and personal and its obsession with whether Adrian Childs still has the same chemistry at six in the morning with Christine . . . Thing . . . What's her name? Well, if that's all it teaches you, you might as well not bother going to university at all. Get up! Go on! Leave! Now!"

Sadly, from what I've gleaned from my experience of undergraduates at many so-called uni[versities] today and from the reflections of colleagues, this has quite a whiff of reality. It puts me in mind of a quotation from a Dario Fo farce Accidental Death of an Anarchist,
  "Everyone enjoys a good scandal; it's like the smell of your own shit."

Maybe the diminutive, uni is a neologistic attempt to convey a deeper diminution.

No comments:

Post a Comment